The path of infinite revision:

TOL PLANTATION MASSACRE.

…. how australian history becomes distorted

Book review by Bob Wurth.

An Australian book giving the Japanese side of the Kokoda campaign demonstrates how Australian history can become distorted for future generations through the repetition of dubious revisionist theory and the re-writing of accounts qualifying Japanese wartime atrocities.

The book is The Path of Infinite Sorrow, the Japanese on the Kokoda Track, (Allen & Unwin, 2009) by  Craig Collie of Sydney and Japanese translator-interpreter and researcher Hajime Marutani of Tokyo.

The recycling of historically inaccurate views about Australia at war, the repetition of somewhat dodgy commentary - some already withdrawn as inaccurate - and some rather less than historically rigorous accounts of Japanese atrocities, has regrettably blemished a book that otherwise serves as an informative narrative from the Japanese side about the battles along the Kokoda Track and elsewhere in New Guinea.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this book, and the greatest disservice that the authors do to Australian history, is the manner in which Collie and Marutani tell the story of the Japanese massacres of Australian soldiers at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations after the Japanese capture of Rabaul, from which the Australians fled, in January 1942.

In early February of that year the Australian troops who had put up a fierce fight Rabaul struggled southward to escape the Japanese. The men made their way through rugged jungle and crossed mountains intersected by rivers. They reached Tol and Waitavalo coconut plantations on Wide Bay on 2 February utterly exhausted and without adequate food and supplies. Heavy rain fell. Many of the men suffered from malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers.

When the Japanese landed at Tol by barge, the Australians waved white flags and quietly surrendered. A few days later about 150 Australian prisoners were lined up and roped together in small groups and led into the bush. Soon fearful screams echoed through the plantation as the Australian soldiers gradually were shot or bayoneted, or both, sometimes individually and sometimes in small groups of men roped together.

The book briefly details the atrocities with Australian soldiers being taken into the bush and no gunfire was heard, “…but blood-curdling screams were heard and the guards returned with blood on their bayonets.”

Bayoneting prisoners ‘very pragmatic’

Then Collie and Marutani give this unconvincing explanation for the Japanese barbarity:

“Clearly some, and possibly many, of the Australians were bayoneted while tied. This is not inconsistent with Japanese military training. Kure Naval Station’s Notes for Unit Commanders recommends forcing raw recruits to bayonet prisoners to cure any apprehensiveness they might have about doing it in actual combat. Cold-blooded perhaps, but very pragmatic. Military training is not for the squeamish; he who hesitates in hand-to-hand fighting is lost.

“The number of people killed at Tol is usually reckoned at about 150. The wartime propaganda version has all captured Australians tied to coconut trees and bayoneted, which raises the question: how do we know?”

Just what the authors meant in their connection there is between the ‘pragmatic’ brutality of these atrocities and the books statement that ‘Military training is not for the squeamish’ is open to conjecture.

‘How do we know?’, the authors ask. Well in fact we know to a certain degree of accuracy what happened at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations because the details were carefully investigated and documented.

The Path of Infinite Sorrow says events of the plantation massacres can be reconstructed from ‘fragmentary accounts’. This is not so. The chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland at the time, Sir William Webb, conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the massacres and his report contains eyewitness accounts and is far from ‘fragmentary’.

(Justice Webb went on to chair the International Military Tribunal for the Fast East in Tokyo between 1946 and 1948.)

Collie and Marutani point out that 20 prisoners were not killed but were taken back to Rabaul, but later died en route to Japan when their ship was sunk.

Webb reports not consulted?

It would seem that Collie and Marutani did not consult the Justice Webb reports on the Tol and Waitavalo massacres, as they are not listed in their endnotes in their book. Instead, they refer to books by other authors. This is unfortunate, at best, given that Webb’s reports are readily available online through the National Archives of Australia or can be viewed in a number of key Australian libraries.

Webb records that when Japanese soldiers regularly returned from their murdering exploits, wiping blood from their bayonets, they shouted simply “Next!” in English and pushed their victims forward. The waiting men had heard the terrible screams as the bayonets were driven home into their mates.

Two of the victims, badly bayoneted in the stomach, managed to reach a hut, but Japanese soldiers set fire to it and burnt the two to Australians death.

About six Australians managed to escape New Britain to tell the story. At first authorities had difficulty believing their tale. But the men’s bayonet wounds provided the evidence. 

Sir William Webb wrote of the Japanese atrocities at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations:

“… they were outrageously cruel and wicked and carried out with savage brutality. The men were killed one by one, practically in the presence of each other.”

(Read a summary of the report report of Sir William Webb, NAA A1066, H45/580/2/8/1.)

But in further explaining the Japanese action, Collie and Marutani, while acknowledging the ‘abhorrent’ behaviour at Tol plantation, failed in their efforts to take an "even handed" approach to the atrocities:

“There’s no question Tol was an act of barbarity. Japanese military training included indoctrination that the expected enemy in the Pacific War was a racist, colonial oppressor bent on subjugation of the Asian races, in the same way that Australian military training of the time proposed all Japanese were small, short-sighted, buck toothed and less than human.

“In both cases, it makes the enemy easier to kill. Additionally, Japanese soldiers were trained in the belief that the Allies would kill all prisoners taken – indeed, that allowing yourself to be taken prisoner would bring shame on you and your family.”

Collie and Marutani go on further to explain why the Japanese might have behaved in such an abhorrent manner, indicating that one answer could be the fact that there was a violent outbreak of malaria during the ‘clean-up’ of Rabaul and it included “the pursuing patrols, particularly those operating from Kokopo.”

But the plantations massacres cannot be easily explained away . As author Paul Ham said in his review of The Path of Infinite Sorrow in the Weekend Australian Review, on November 7-8, 2009:

“This book’s chief failure is the equanimity with which Japanese atrocities are explained or qualified or, the greater sin, simply omitted altogether. The Japanese have a talent for recasting themselves as victims, not aggressors, but many Japanese troops set a new precedent for brutality in the Pacific War, as they emulated the Samurai phantasms of their imaginations.”

Untrue Curtin slur by 'internationalists' recycled

In their book the authors repeat past inaccuracies that have come from the “internationalist school” at the Australian War Memorial from historians who have downplayed the Australian role in the war against Japan in comparison to ‘the wider picture’ in the international scene.

Craig Collie and Hajime Marutani lamentably recycle the slur against Australian wartime leader John Curtin that he told lies to the Australian public about Japanese invasion plans.

They write that there had been ‘a panic reaction’ in the Australian press and public from government advertising and propaganda:

“Military historian Peter Stanley speculates that Curtin’s claim of an invasion plan might have been made for electoral advantage or to mobilise the Australian people or to cover the success of Allied code-breaking, but concludes it probably arose from the pressure of responsibility as prime minister. Not only did Curtin not save Australia from a real threat, Stanley suggests, he gave it a legacy of bogus invasion-plan stories.”

The difficulty with reprocessing these views is that Stanley withdrew the slur against Curtin in a radio interview with Richard Glover on ABC 702 Sydney on September 5, 2008, which should have given Collie ample time to get the issue straight in his book.

Collie also recycles the often repeated but less than accurate contention that ‘middle-ranking naval staff in Tokyo’ proposed an invasion of Australia to prevent its use as a base,  but the army knocked it back and ‘the proposal was rejected, never to surface again.’

This cursory argument neatly dismisses the extensive debate in wartime Japan in the first months of the war in 1942, as stated by Professor Hiromi Tanaka, of Japan’s National Defense Academy, who in August 2007 said in part:

• “…there were so many high ranking officers, including those in the Navy General Staff, who were arguing about attacking Australia. Also in the Combined Fleet; arguing about attacking and invading Australia. It wasn’t just the initiative of junior officers involved in this talk.”

In all, while telling interesting stories of battles, especially the Japanese side of the Kokoda campaign, The Path of Infinite Sorrow sadly disappointes as it skews and attempts to re-write aspects of Australian history.

- Review of The Path of Infinite Sorrow, The Japanese on the Kokoda Track, by Bob Wurth.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TOL PLANTATION ATROCITIES IN NEW BRITAIN

Extract partly from Bob Wurth's 1942, Australia's greatest peril, Pan Macmillan Australia....

Australians had heard stories of Japanese brutality for some years, especially in China, but there remained an element of doubt. Stories of Japanese atrocities on New Britain after the capture of Rabaul in 1942 now made it to the Australian public as survivors reached Port Moresby. The Sydney Morning Herald on 7 April carried “almost incredible revelations” from three servicemen who have escaped. Details below:

One survivor told of the massacre at Tol plantation near Rabaul, where the men were tied together in small groups and each party was taken into the jungle in different directions:

“My party was stopped after going a short distance. A Japanese officer drew his sword and ordered his men to fix bayonets. One Australian after another was detached from the party and sent into the bush with a Japanese soldier armed with a bayonet. Soon after we heard screams and wondered what was happening…

“One of our men asked to be shot, and this was done by the officer himself. Another of our fellows got loose some way and dashed into the bush, but the officer caught up with him and then ran his sword through his back and then shot him.

“After that several men were bayoneted only a few yards from me without being taken into the undergrowth.”

(SMH 7 Apr, 1942.)

Prime Minister John Curtin at first said the atrocities were not proven. Like many Australians, the Melbourne Herald’s senior journalist Joe Alexander thought the horror stories unlikely, as he wrote in his diary:

“There is an overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence against the atrocity charges against the Japanese since they entered the war.”  

Alexander was disturbed by official “scare posters” appearing in cities and towns and in government-sponsored racist newspaper advertisements across Australia, such as:

“How right were out instincts. The Japanese who came to spy out our land, now attempt to return and enslave it. Everyone a spy, everyone a killer.”

(Alexander diary, 17 Apr, 1942, NLA MS2389. Poster/advertisement of 1942 in Australian War Memorial collection, RCO2371.)

Curtin too was hoping that the allegations were untrue. The government was concerned for the relatives of the victims of atrocities and also worried about the effect such news might have on the well-being of Australian prisoners of the Japanese.

Curtin in 1942 didn’t know that thousands of Australian prisoners of war, especially those captured in Malaya and Singapore, soon would suffer the most appalling and prolonged atrocities at the hands of the Japanese on the Thai-Burma railway. 

(Webb report summary into atrocities, NAA A1006, H45/580/2/8/1.)

'HORRIFYING FACTS' OF ATROCITIES IN PACIFIC AREA

But by January 31, 1944, Prime Minister Curtin had become fully aware of the atrocities that had been committed during the war so far. In a statement that day he said: "The facts are so horrifying that they surely speak for themselves and reveal to every body the nature of the enemy which Australia has, for over two years, been resisting.

"To relieve the prisoners of war in Japanese hands - who include not only the fighting forces but also civilians of our own race and peaceful citizens of other races - calls for the earliest termination of the war. Resolutions of protest and expressions of horror are insufficient and what is needed is the complete devotion of all to the termination of the war victoriously.

"It must be clear that the Protecting Power (Switzerland) is not able in this matter to accomplish much. Only the Allies themselves, of their own strength, can effect a change. The only change will be the earliest realization on the part of Japan that she will be defeated."

(Source: John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, JCPML 00110/78. Digest of Decisions and Announcements by the Prime Minister, No. 73, 11th January to 27th January 1944.)